The Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) was the cornerstone of the British electricity industry for almost forty years, from 1957 to privatisation in the 1990s.[1]

Because of its origins in the immediate post-war period, when electricity demand grew rapidly but plant and fuel availability was often unreliable, most of the industry saw its mission as to provide an adequate and secure electricity supply, or "to keep the lights on" as they put it, rather than pursuing the cheapest generation route.

The organisation was unusual in that most of its senior staff were professional engineers, but with excellent support in financial and risk-management areas.

Some people feel that it represented the best of government planning, others feel that it had become a monolith that exemplified the worst aspects of central planning and was ripe for reform. It is probably the case that, in its most successful period, up until the mid-1970s, it was managed in a way broadly comparable to large private-sector energy majors such as BP, but that it was late to respond to the changed pattern of energy growth following the second oil crisis.

The CEGB was established by section 2 of the Electricity Act 1957.[2] It consisted of a chairman and seven to nine members, appointed by the Minister of Power, who had experience or capacity in "the generation or supply of electricity, industrial, commercial or financial matters, applied science, administration, or the organisation of workers"

It was under a duty to develop and maintain an efficient, co-ordinated and economical system of supply of electricity in bulk for all parts of England and Wales, and for that purpose to generate or acquire supplies of electricity and to provide bulk supplies of electricity for the Area Boards for distribution by those Boards. It also had power to supply bulk electricity to the Scottish Boards or electricity undertakings outside Great Britain.

At the centre was the National Control Room of the National Grid in London, which was part of the control hierarchy for the system. There were also both area and district grid control rooms, which were originally at Newcastle upon Tyne, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham, St Albans, East Grinstead and Bristol. The shift control engineers who worked in these control rooms would cost, schedule and load dispatch an economic commitment of generation to the main interconnected system (the 400/275/132kV network) at an adequate level of security. They also had information about the running costs and availability of every power producing plant in England and Wales. They constantly anticipated demand, monitored and instructed power stations to increase, reduce or stop electricity production. They used what was known as the "merit order", a ranking of each generator in power stations based upon how much they cost to produce electricity. The objective was to ensure that electricity production was achieved at the lowest possible cost.

The CEGB had an extensive R&D section with its three principal laboratories at Leatherhead (Central Electricity Research Laboratories, CERL); Marchwood Engineering Laboratory (MEL); and, Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories (BNL). There were also five regional facilities. These Scientific Service Departments had a base in each Region. A major SSD role was solving engineering problems with the several designs of 500 MW units. These were a significant increase in unit size and had many teething problems, most of which were solved to result in reliable service and gave good experience towards the design of the 660 MW units.

In contrast, PowerGen, later taken over by E.ON, undertook a programme to port the entire system to current hardware. The most current version of Cutlass, 'PT-Cutlass Kit 9', runs on Motorola PPC-based hardware, with the engineering workstation and administrative functions provided by a standard Microsoft Windows PC. It is fully compatible (with a few minor exceptions) with the DEC PDP-11 version (kit 1) released by PowerGen and has a high level of compatibility with the final version of kit 1 formerly used at National Power.[4] It is used at four UK power stations: Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Cottam, Fiddlers Ferry, and Ferrybridge.

The shares in National Grid were distributed to the regional electricity companies prior to their own privatisation in 1990. PowerGen and National Power were privatised in 1991, with 60% stakes in each company sold to investors, the remaining 40% being held by the UK government. The privatisation process was initially delayed as it was concluded that the 'earlier decided nuclear power plant assets in National Power' would not be included in the private National Power. A new company was formed, Nuclear Electric, which would eventually own and operate the nuclear power assets, and the nuclear power stations were held in public ownership for a number of years.[7]

Although electricity privatisation began in 1990, the CEGB continued to exist until the Central Electricity Generating Board (Dissolution) Order 2001, a statutory instrument, came into force on 9 November 2001.[10]